Symbolism in The Trial Novel (original) (raw)

A Deconstructive reading of Franz Kafka ’ s The Trial Name

2021

Kafka’s The Trial, an invisible and a unique piece of fiction, provides the readers with an ambience of uncertainty and sense of ambiguous and mysterious environment. Written in 1915 and posthumously published in 1925, Kafka’s The Trial narrates the story of Josef K, a banker, unexpectedly arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible and unspecified court system for a crime he says he was unaware of. Josef finds himself in an impossible, nightmarish and tormenting situation here charge which he is accused of and the justice is unknown and uncertain.The Trial it can be interpreted on many levels such as; as a brutal satire of the absurdity of unfair judicial systems, a frighteningly disturbing examination of the peculiarity of bureaucracy and a vivid demonstration of human weaknesses in face of authority such as the corporate control of the human lives exploiting people’s fear of losing jobs, the subjection of authority at the hands of accused being, thus destabilizing the hiera...

Reading Kafka's 'Trial' Politically: Justice-Law-Power

Contemporary Political Theory

This article offers a political reading of Franz Kafka’s posthumous work The Trial. In this novel, the main protagonist (Joseph K.) is subject to an arrest and trial conducted by the ambiguous authority of a shadowy court and its officials. This article explores Joseph K.’s experience of being subject to the Law, and relates this to our own understanding and experience of political subjectivity in modern times. K.’s doomed search for order through a ‘permanent resolution’ of his case is related to the modern desire for order:Specifically, the desire for both philosophical and political frameworks that provide narratives or certainty. Here modernity is understood to be characterized by an anxiety brought about by a crisis in authorship and authority. The article then considers K.’s desire for justice and the Law, and his entanglement with the power of the court, as analogous to the modern experience of the triad of justice–law–power, which is subsumed under the banner of ‘sovereignty’. In particular, the artile explores K.’s inability to locate, read, or fix the Law; a problem that is also reflected in the aporia of sovereignty as justice– law–power. K.’s experience alerts us to the contradictions in the triad justice–law– power; contradictions that occur as although each member of the triad is dependent upon the other two, each member of the triad also seeks to exclude or deny this dependency. Thus, read politically, K.’s struggle in The Trial can be seen as a reflection of the modern struggle with sovereignty as the triad justice–law–power, and the impasse that K. reaches is also the impasse that modernity has reached.

Kafka revisited: On funny scenes, comic gestures and odd characters in The Trial

2016

Kafka is a very modern and serious writer, with misery and beauty twisted together; like some tormented, submissive messenger bringing us bad news from a distant office. But probably that is just an old cliché. As David Foster Wallace (1998) points out on humour and irony in his article „Laughing with Kafka“, he is also a funny author. His horrific and hopeless novel, The Trial, is perhaps the funniest of Kafkas work. „Kafka's friend, Max Brod, talked of how Kafka found humour in his dark works - especially the chilling "The Trial", which he thought a hoot, laughing so hard while reading the first chapter aloud, that he repeatedly had to stop to collect himself.“

The Trial by Kafka :In the Light of Existentialism and Absurdism

IJELC, 2018

Kafka was an absurd writer. The absurdism derived from existentialism , nihilism and so on. To the absurdists, the entire life of humanbeing seems to be meaningless. In this novel, The Trial, kafka has shown the absurdity of law and order. In this article I have chosen to analyse this novel in the light of absurdism and existentialism.

Kafka’s The Trial, Psychoanalysis, and the Administered Society

International Journal of Žižek Studies, 2020

Analyses of Kafka’s The Trial often read the text as an existentialist work, arguing that the novel metaphorizes the absurdity of a modern world where God no longer exists. However, I agree with Slavoj Žižek, who posits that such a modernist reading ignores what is most vital in Kafka’s text—that the absence of God is “always already filled by an inert, obscene, revolting presence” (2009: 146). I argue that this “revolting presence” for Josef K is the presence of the Court; The Trial describes the subject within a society organized by the symbolic order, the big Other, the symbolic network of rules regulating our lives and structuring our reality. For this reason, I read The Trial as pointing the way toward critical postmodernism. But a strictly postmodernist reading of The Trial cannot work without the Lacanian intervention of the split subject. Readings of The Trial based solely on the framework of Foucault’s power/knowledge theory, without a consideration of Lacanian subject form...

Crisis and Meaning: F. Kafka and the Law

Coactivity: Philosophy, Communication, 2017

The parable “Before the Law” is a pivotal text in the work of Franz Kafka. It tells of a man who looks for the law as the quintessence of his life. But his quest for meaning comes to a crisis because of a fundamental deception. Instead of interpreting the law as a personal mystery, he somehow objectifies it. His abstract view on life begets the obstacle-character that embodies all those who could bar him from finding the law. In this narrative, the failure of finding the law results in a murder in which human life is reduced to bestial death. In this sense, Kafka’s narrative is a tale of anti-creation. In a close reading we analyze the text with attention for the ternary structure, i.e. the intertwined complex of the I-Thou relation and the I-It relation (Martin Buber). The literary text is interpreted for its philosophical relevance. Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas but also Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida have an important role in this way of reading.

Starring Joseph K. : four stage adaptations of Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial

1997

In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission.

Reaction Paper Before the law by Franz Kafka

This is a short reaction paper in the short parable, Before the Law, included in the novel, the Trial by Franz Kafka. This aims to explain [in my perspective] what are the allegories present in the story and what are their representation.